Cora Crane - Return To Jacksonville

Return To Jacksonville

Cora returned to Jacksonville in 1901 while the City was still in ruins following the Great Fire. Miraculously the Ward Street Bordello District had escaped the general destruction, and she quickly found financing to build her signature brothel in the LaVilla District. Called "The Court", it was located at the Southwest corner of Ward (Now Houston) and Davis Street. The two-story brick building had 14 bedrooms (parlour rooms), ballroom, kitchens, and dining room and an annex with eight bedrooms. Business boomed and within short order Cora had expanded to partial ownership in several other "resorts" as well as building a grand tropical bordello at Pablo Beach that she called the Palmetto Lodge.

On June 1, 1905, Cora married Hammond P. McNeill, the 25-year-old son of a prominent South Carolina family, and an employee of Cora's as the manager of The Annex, a bar she partially owned at the Everett Hotel. He was also the nephew of Anna McNeill Whistler, the mother of the artist and subject of his famous painting known as Whistler's Mother. McNeill shot and killed a lover of his wife's, although he was acquitted because the laws of the time allowed this type of protection. The couple was divorced shortly afterward. The divorce decree forbade her using the name McNeil, therefore, she reverted to using Crane.

Cora became a regular contributor to the leading publications of the country, including Smart Set and Harpers Weekly. Toward the end of her career, however, she became restless and took on the Bohemian lifestyle, similar to what Stephen Crane had done in New York while he wrote The Red Badge of Courage. She had been planning to return to Europe and take up her writing again in a European atmosphere.

For the last three years of her life, she spent much of her time in Pablo Beach, Florida (now Jacksonville Beach), but she maintained a home in the city of Jacksonville. She suffered a stroke after helping push a stranded car out of the sand, went back to her house and died there on September 5, 1910 aged 45. She is buried in the Evergreen Cemetery in Jacksonville, Florida.